Days after the Archdiocese of Baltimore rolled out a proposal for realigning its operations in the city, a group of volunteers gathered at Our Lady of Good Counsel Catholic Church to plan one of South Baltimore’s biggest annual events, the Taste of Spring.
As they discussed the raffle, games and food they’ll serve up at the May 5 street festival, talk turned to the massive archdiocese reset effort, known as “Seek the City to Come,” and how it could affect Good Counsel and its sister parishes in the Catholic Community of South Baltimore, Holy Cross and St. Mary Star of the Sea.
If approved, the plan would reduce the number of parishes in Baltimore from 61 to 21 and the number of worship sites from 59 to 26. Good Counsel in Locust Point and St. Mary’s in the Riverside neighborhood, with all of 324 years of history between them, would be among those closed or repurposed.
Congregants are feeling sadness, defiance and everything in between, said Andrew Smith, a longtime member of Holy Cross in Riverside who was present at the meeting. And that’s why so many will be piling into a church van and heading Thursday night to Archbishop Curley High School in Northeast Baltimore for the first public meeting on the proposal.
“I think every parish scheduled to close wants to know, ‘Why us?'” said Smith, whose forebears first joined Holy Cross in the 1860s. “People are emotional at this early stage, and a lot are going to be asking, ‘Is the situation really that bad financially? At a micro level, it doesn’t seem that way to us. Can you please explain what you’re thinking?'”
Pastors across Baltimore first shared the proposal with the city’s Catholic faithful at Masses on April 14. The goal of Seek the City is to revitalize the church’s ministries and services in a needy Baltimore by reducing its footprint and reallocating its resources.
The Catholic population of the city has shrunk from a peak of 250,000 in the 1950s to fewer than 5,000 today. Its pews can seat 25,000 people, but only about 2,000 fill them on Sundays. And aging buildings have gotten prohibitively expensive to maintain.
Seek the City to Come proposal
The Seek the City to Come proposal would reorganize and relocate Catholic parishes in Baltimore City and some immediate suburbs to lower the number of parishes to 21 from 61 and the number of worship sites to 26 from 59.
Note: Two Baltimore City parishes that the Archdiocese of Baltimore says don’t currently have worship sites are not mapped. The Church of the Immaculate Conception would be in the Far Northwest Mosaic Parish with New All Saints (parish seat) and St. Cecilia. St. Pius V would be in the West Baltimore Radiating Parish with St. Bernardine (parish seat), St. Edward and St. Gregory the Great and St. Peter Claver.
Map: Steve Earley, Source: Archdiocese of Baltimore
Church leaders hope to use Seek the City to bring resources closer to where they’re most needed, Bishop Bruce A. Lewandowski, a co-director of the initiative, has said, comparing the process to how pruning a tree redirects its energies to promote life.
“We have to get smaller to get bigger,” he said.
Lewandowski stresses that the plan — formulated through two years’ worth of listening sessions, public discussions, online conversations, research and prayer — is only a proposal. Church officials have scheduled three town hall-style meetings over the next few weeks to allow Catholics to share reactions, ask questions and make suggestions, all of which Lewandowski says will be taken into consideration as the Seek the City team develops more refined plans.
The first will be from 6:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. Thursday at Archbishop Curley High School in Northeast Baltimore. The second is set for April 29 from 7 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. at Our Lady of Fatima Church in East Baltimore and will be held in Spanish. The third will take place April 30 from 6:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. at Our Lady of Victory Church in Southwest Baltimore. That revised schedule, announced Thursday, added a session and changed one location.
The town halls are open to the public and will include virtual components for online participation. In the meantime, Lewandowski said, people can send their reactions and recommendations to church officials at seekthecity@archbalt.org or www.archbalt.org/seekthecity/contact-us.
“I hope that people will come forward and offer their insights, their concerns and constructive criticism,” he said. “I know we get angry, and we’ll speak from our anger, and I will understand that completely and totally in this public-comment phase that we’re now in. But I hope that folks can understand that this is all being done because we love the church. … This initiative is really for new life, new energy and rebirth.”
The Seek the City team, including some 200 clergy and lay Catholics, will weigh the feedback, incorporate it into revised versions, share those with archdiocesan committees and present a final proposal to Archbishop William E. Lori.
Lori is expected to sign off on a final plan by June.
The mood varied at city parishes as the meetings awaited.
The Rev. Patrick Carrion is pastor of a cluster of five churches in Northeast Baltimore — St. Francis of Assisi, Shrine of the Little Flower, Most Precious Blood, St. Anthony of Padua and St. Dominic — and said his congregants were taken aback last weekend to learn all five would be closed or repurposed.
Carrion has encouraged them to attend the upcoming meetings, even passing out colored attendance cards as reminders.
“I think many people are coming, and they’re not coming to ask questions,” he said. “They’re coming to make their voices heard, and some are really rallying the troops. It reminds me of a scene out of ‘Les Mis.'”
Things sounded less volatile in East Baltimore, where St. Francis Xavier, St. Ann’s and St. Wenceslaus form a pastorate of historic African American churches.
Regine LaForest-Sharif, president of its parish council, said the churches’ members are largely older, and many are so attached to their churches it has been challenging just to harmonize the congregations in their current configuration.
Now, many are “on pins and needles” trying to figure out what the plan would mean. The map the archdiocese distributed, for instance, shows St. Francis Xavier as a worship site but suggests a link to St. Ignatius in the central Baltimore neighborhood of Mount Vernon, which shares little of the pastorate’s history.
Parishioners at St. Wenceslaus and St. Ann speaking Sunday morning before Mass described anguish and confusion coming from the proposal, while some acknowledged the dilemma the archdiocese faced.
St. Wenceslaus’ choir director, Craig Randall, said that the proposal to close the church on Ashland Avenue weighed heavy on his heart, though he wasn’t sure what else could be done. He said attendance at the church, where he’s been for 35 years, had gradually dwindled over the years from two fully packed Masses each Sunday down to one Mass with about 40 to 50 congregants among the notably emptier pews.
Mary Carr, a longtime St. Wenceslaus congregant, said she might have to catch Mass on television in the future. She started attending Mass at St. Wenceslaus in the late 1960s after a move brought her much closer to the Ashland Avenue church than her prior parish, St. Francis Xavier. Likely the first Black congregant at St. Wenceslaus, Carr “wasn’t received very well” by the predominately white congregation at first, she said.
“But this is God’s house,” and God doesn’t discriminate, she said. Carr and her family continued attending, and her great-grandchildren attend the now-predominately Black church. Some of her family members are planning on attending this week’s meeting to get a better understanding of the proposal.
LaForest-Sharif expects many to attend the meetings in search of details.
“I’m encouraging people,” she said. “It will be folks from the archdiocese answering questions from people who have not necessarily been around the table. I think opportunities like that will be helpful.”
St. Ann parishioner and community activist Ralph Moore said that he and his fellow congregants are hoping to have a good turnout at the public sessions and at an upcoming meeting for members of the city’s predominately Black churches. He hopes they can convince the archdiocese to “reconsider and rescind” the proposal to close St. Ann, citing the church’s strengths such as its vibrant church life, historical significance, financial strength and ties to the community.
The congregation pushed back when St. Ann was among several churches threatened with closure in the mid-1990s, responding with a successful effort to raise $30,000 in pennies in a matter of weeks for roof repairs. The church was ultimately spared.
“We have the feeling that you can fight back,” Moore said.
Mary Sewell, 68, now lives in Nottingham but continues to attend Mass at St. Ann, where she had worshipped since she was 8 years old. She said she didn’t want to leave her community, which she described as a “family.”
“I have no idea where I’ll go. I’m praying on it,” she said, also pointing out that others in the surrounding community depend on the church for services like its health fair and food pantry.
“St. Ann belongs to the community,” she said.
The tone was less mournful at St. Francis Xavier, which is expected to absorb the other two churches.
“It’s not about the building; it’s about the church,” said Kim Grays.
Diane Lewis sat next to Grays in the front pew before Sunday’s Mass, wearing white to honor deceased members of the group.
“God is everywhere,” Lewis said. “Even if we have to take church in our basement, we are still praising him.”
To the North, Pat Dorn, a longtime member of St. Pius X in Towson, said he fears the archdiocese has made up its mind on a new Baltimore-area layout.
A few fellow parishioners will probably go to the first meeting, he said, but he and his close friends won’t be among them. “I think it’s a waste of time going and hearing it,” he said.
Smith also plans to skip the first town hall, but he said it’s because he worries that he might get too emotional to be helpful. He intends to stay at home and pray.
But he thinks there’s so much interest that the venues might not be big enough to hold everyone who does show up.
“You just can’t make a change as dramatic as this without folks saying, ‘What the hell?'” Smith said. “It’s going to be a lot of people.”
Baltimore Sun reporter Dan Belson and photojournalist Amy Davis contributed to this article.
